EP. 180 — Caitlin Moran – LIVE

Jameela: [00:00:00] Hello. Hello. Can you hear me? You can. Okay, good. One second. Is my vagina out? No, okay. Oh shit my ass. I always find this bit really scary. It’s so nice to see you. Hello. Are you well? I’m thrilled to be here with all of you. Today, we are listening to a chat for the I Weigh podcast with Jameela Jamil. I don’t know why I said my full name, but here we are where we get to kick shame right in its arsehole [00:01:00] together. And my guest is the wonderful Caitlin Moran. Can I get a round of applause?

Caitlin’s been on this podcast before when she wrote about the experience of being the mother of someone with an eating disorder and gave such a helpful and meaningful chat about all of that that was responded to so beautifully by so many of you and so I asked her to come back to talk about her new book It’s called What About Men. Uh oh. A hugely controversial subject. And I’m not going to explain what this book’s about, I’m going to let her do it. But can you please give the warmest welcome ever to the excellent Caitlin Moran.

Caitlin: Hiya. Oh, I’m sweaty. Are you sweaty?

Jameela: Yeah.

Caitlin: I tell you, London’s deodorants are not working and I include mine in that. I got here four minutes ago off a packed Victoria line and the smell, it’s so [00:02:00] onion y out there, like it’s just

Jameela: It’s funny you say that, I’m wearing natural deodorant, which, what’s the fucking point? But um, but I think it was Chelsea Peretti who said it smells like French onion soup by the end of the day, so if we do meet each other, stand about four feet back.

Caitlin: Luckily, I like French onion soup, so I want to eat you up like the delicious dish that you are, so.

Jameela: We both have our bags on stage, and we were discussing this earlier, how we like to do that, because women just have this need to always be prepared. We just have this underlying, constant feeling that some shit is going to go down, and so

Caitlin: You’ve got to have a safety pin, something absorbent, a pill, like, kind of like a I’m 48. I rattle with pills now. So if anybody needs a painkiller, let me know. I can throw them out into the audience like pantomime. If there’s any women here with sore backs at the end of a week, I will chuck you a codeine. Just let me know.

Jameela: So how are you doing?

Caitlin: Good. Yeah. It’s been a crazy couple of weeks because the book’s just about to come out in America. So I’ve I don’t even know what day it is, to be honest. I went to America for 24 hours to do a photo shoot, then came back, did an event in Bath last [00:03:00] night, I did an interview with the New York Times today, and then, and then my daughter came into the room and went, Mom, I’ve been day daydrinking in Finsbury Park, and, and I, I thought that I was at one with the animals, and I went to hug a fox and it’s bitten me, and just

Jameela: Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!

Caitlin: That’s the daughter who had the eating disorder. As you can see, she is now fully recovered. Too well, I would say. She needs to take the edge off a bit. She’s too alive now.

Jameela: Uh, well, thank you for being here, just raced here on the Tube. I really appreciate you bramming us in, but I was dying to have this conversation with you. And when I first said that you were going to be coming here, there was an interesting reaction. There was lots of positivity, but then there was some skepticism because some people are upset about your book. Before we talk about why, can you tell everyone what What About Men is about?

Caitlin: Men.

Jameela: Right. I walked right into that. I felt that as I said it.

Caitlin: Well, no, well, it came from, from uh, uh, an increasing amount of requests. So, obviously, I’ve, uh, I’ve [00:04:00] spent, I was going to wear my Team Poon t shirt tonight just to remind you, I like taking awful things from like male stag nights and then re appropriating them, like I was in Magaluf at a literary festival last year and there were lots of I Love Vagina t shirts that boys were wearing, I was like, I’m going to get one of those. It’s brilliant if you’re a woman and you take a sexist object and you wear it, suddenly it actually becomes really feminist. So, yeah, so, um, women. I’ve written about women and girls, uh, for the last decade now. I love them. I am team tits. And then I would realize that when I would go out and do an event, and I’d spend an hour talking about women and girls and their problems and feminism, the second or third question I would almost always be asked from someone in the audience was, yeah, but what about men?

And at first I was like, I don’t care. They seem to be fine. Uh, also it would be the ultimate irony of feminism, would it not, if women had to solve all the problems of women and then all the problems of men. But then time went on, and I kept being asked this question, and it wasn’t just sort of men asking a tricksy question to catch me out. It was mums that were concerned about their sons. It was women who were concerned about their partners, women who were concerned about their fathers. And then, two [00:05:00] years ago on International Women’s Day, we get a day! I was doing an event in a college with 16 and 17 year olds, half boys, half girls. And, I thought we’d be talking about women and girls because it was our day. And, uh, the boys didn’t like that. Uh, they had a different idea. Uh, they were like, no, we want to talk about boys. We’re always talking about women and girls now. Feminism has gone too far. The women are winning now and the boys are losing. And it’s harder now to be a man than a woman. And they were angry. And I always find it interesting when you find a cohort of people who are angry because angry people are scared people underneath it. Anger is just fear brought to the boil. And I said, what is it about these 15 and 16 year old boys that means that they’re scared of women? How can they be scared of women? How can they think we’re winning? By any measurable index, we’re still not. Feminism has done amazing things and will continue to do amazing things, but the pay gap still exists. One in four of us will be sexually assaulted or raped in our lifetimes. And you look around at the world leaders, they’re still [00:06:00] predominantly men. The richest people in the world are still men in the top 10. So like women aren’t winning. So why do we have

Jameela: But we have Beyonce. That’s the argument.

Caitlin: We’ve got Beyonce. Yes. And to be fair, that’s, you know, that’s not an inconsiderable bonus that we have, but maybe not quite enough. So it was like, so what is it that boys think that girls have that they don’t, how can they think we’re winning? What is the thing? What are they jealous of? And like, the only thing I could think of after I sat and deeped it, as the young people say, uh, I love using the young slang. If you’ve got teenage children and you use their slang, it drives them insane. Like, I’ll be eating some food and I’ll go, my, this is peng. They hate it. They can’t stand it. They’re like, you’re ruining our culture. Just stop. So I deeped it and I was like, well, the only thing that women have that men don’t is we have feminism. We have invented this thing that allows us to talk about our problems, that allows us to talk about the constrictions of the ideas of what our gender should be doing and crushing [00:07:00] them or reinventing them. We’ve got this incredible, completely informal network that we’ve formed over a century now of talking about our problems, busting shame, going into taboos and breaking them, inventing new kinds of women over and over and over and over. And all I need to do is read any history book and read what a woman like me would have been doing 100 or 150 years ago and the life that I actually have now to see that we have absolutely changed our concept of what it is to be a woman. And I was like, well, maybe that’s what they’re jealous of. We’re not reinventing boys in that way. There hasn’t been that kind of progress. We haven’t started talking about the other side of gender boys in the brilliant, creative, fun, inclusive, global way that we have with women. And so that was where I was like, okay, I need to scrap the book that I’m working on now. I think I want to write this book. I want to ask the question honestly and non sarcastically what about men and answer it.

Jameela: And also, it’s not just that there’s an absence of us talking, like being able to reinvent men. There’s an active kind of, fuck men, men are trash, and there’s a dialogue that feels quite [00:08:00] anti men that exists, even in the mainstream of feminism which I think borders on misandry, which you and I have both always kind of taken a step away from, because I don’t think that’s helpful. It’s not actually what most of us want. A lot of the people that we love in our lives and will love in our lives are men. And so I want us to find like peace and actual equality and not revenge.

Caitlin: We’re all brothers and sisters. There’s a bit in the end of the book where I’m like, you know, I come from a big family and like, I don’t know, half boys and half girls. And I’m just very aware that like, you know, in my childhood, when we were all in the backseat, driving towards a holiday, that’s what we are doing existentially. We’re all just brothers and sisters in the backseat of a car, driving to, in this case, not Cornwall, but eventually the grave. Not to be too existential, but that’s, it’s just us. It’s just, it’s, you know, we are all the guys.

Jameela: 100%. Yeah, and also, I think when I first thought about it, like, I wrestled with it as I started the book and then you said something that just turned it all around for me where I was, you know, because it’s, it’s hard not to be [00:09:00] frustrated, right? We’re sick of the shit. We’re sick of the shit. It’s hard and it’s normal to feel exasperated and just like, why should I care? They don’t care about us. But at the same time, if we want them to care about us, we have to be able to reciprocate that feeling. I think that’s really important. And you said in the book that, you know, maybe people of our generation and generations before us will remember a time when it really was just men on top and then women were just sort of there to be sexy. And for those men, I think they can more understand and digest the movement, right? Because they were there for the complete erasure of anything that was important about women, barring the way that we looked. And then over the age of 25, we were supposed to disappear or kill ourselves.

Now, this generation of boys who we’re now seeing as teenagers, the people who are being drawn to the likes of Andrew Tate, they weren’t alive during the time of the erasure of women. So all they’ve known as they’ve come into real consciousness, [00:10:00] their only understanding of the world is girl power, feminism, fuck men, men are trash. And when you said that, I was like, that’s the, that’s the thought that a lot of us haven’t considered.

Caitlin: Yeah, this is, teenage boys do not have that perspective that even their dads do. Their dads will remember that this, you know, this recent wave of feminism is a recent and very small corrective to 10, 000 years of patriarchy and Benny Hill chasing a sexy schoolgirl around a tree. The boys don’t have that perspective. They don’t remember when it was that bad. So as you say, and like, and now, you know, you know, I work in media. I know that we constantly run uh, features called, you know, 50 women who are going to change the world. You know, 50 women who are, you know, kind of amazing right now. We would never run a list of 50 men. We would definitely never run a list of 50 straight white working class boys who are going to change the world. And like, these are brilliant and correct, good correctives that we need to be talking about. Where are the women? Where are the people of color? But, we just don’t talk about boys. We don’t talk about straight white boys. And we don’t talk about working class boys. And that’s why they turn to people like Andrew Tate because he’s [00:11:00] the only person going, yeah, I’m going to talk about men. I’ll talk about men all day long. I don’t think the solution that he’s pitching to their problems is that useful to a 15 year old boy who’s worried about his GCSEs.

Jameela: Why?

Caitlin: Well, I just think running a kind of Eastern European sex dungeon and stealing ladies and putting them in it.

Jameela: He’s a girl boss. I’m sorry.

Caitlin: Yeah, it’s just

Jameela: That’s my guy.

Caitlin: I mean, he is an entrepreneur in one way, yes, but um, but long term, if you’re a 15 year old boy in Luton worrying about your GCSEs and the size of your willy, he’s not really there with day to day solves to that problem. So, yeah, so I was like, and also I was aware, and part of the reason why women, any woman, you will know the same thing, any woman who is a feminist and has a public platform, we will spend half of our days doing unpaid feminism, gladly and gleefully and joyfully. We’ll be signing petitions, we’ll be retweeting stuff, we’ll be mentoring people, we’ll be talking in parliament, we’ll be, you know, all these things. The men of my generation, who have the same platforms and the same jobs, don’t do that. They don’t mentor young men. There’s that whole generation of men [00:12:00] have just not in the way that we take it for granted that you’ve got to be a good feminist and help the sisterhood.

We don’t really talk about a brotherhood that isn’t that kind of outreach. And, and that’s, so that that’s the generational gap that we’ve got. I do see the good in everyone. And I think from the liberal progressive men that I know, a lot of that was just out of sheer politeness that they were like, didn’t want to talk about men for the last 10 years because they were like, let the ladies have a chance now. It would be so uncouth if in 2010 when How To Be a Woman came out and we were all talking about feminism if a man had just gone “Yeah, okay. Well, let’s talk about men as well. Like let’s not leave them out.”

Jameela: They would have been eaten alive.

Caitlin: Yeah.

Jameela: Yeah hundred percent.

Caitlin: And even now like kind of I jokingly in the book go. Well, why didn’t those guys write a book like this at any point in the last ten years? Why is Muggins here? Gotta take, uh, you know, take six months off from writing about women to write about men, and I’m really busy. And, uh, and the first question I got on the first night was from a man in the front of the audience who went, Well, I’ll tell you why a man didn’t write that book, because can you imagine if a man had written a book called What About Men? He would have been destroyed. Women would have been furious with [00:13:00] him. It would have, it had to be a woman and a feminist who started that conversation. And I was like, yeah, no, you’re probably right.

Jameela: There was ire that you drew from the internet. You know, people, I think there were some women who were upset. They felt like you were abandoning the cause and, and pandering or focusing on the oppressor. And then there were some men who felt like you were speaking for them, which was always a danger. And there were some people who felt like you were underestimating their movement to repair the problems of men.

Now, one thing I would like to respond to for some of those things is that when it comes to underestimating their movement, it’s not that you’re necessarily saying it completely unequivocally doesn’t exist, but it is definitely not reached a mainstream to the point in which any of us are normally aware of it. I don’t know, I can name 10 books about women, or I can name 10 crisis centers or places for women to go.

Caitlin: Blogs, movies, TVs, campaigns, hashtags, legislation.

Jameela: Inspiring films, etc.

Caitlin: Yeah, the bitches are organized, right? Like, kind of like, you know, we get shit done.

Jameela: And I can’t think of it. And so if it doesn’t pop [00:14:00] into someone’s head, if it’s not, a mainstream part of the zeitgeist, then it’s fair to assume that this work isn’t being done.

Caitlin: Well, I was astonished when people went like, why do you feel that you need to talk about this? Why aren’t you saying that there isn’t enough work done for men and boys? Of course there are brilliant, millions of brilliant initiatives and charities, but we don’t have a name for it. There isn’t a word like feminism that talks about the problems of men. And it has a structure to it, and it has no aims. Like, feminism has a very clearly stated one sentence aim. It’s for the equality, the sexual, uh, economic and political equality of women to men. Like, there’s no statement for what men’s problems are. Clearly men’s problems aren’t equality, so what are they? What, what, what, we haven’t got a mission statement. We haven’t got a name for this movement. It doesn’t have an ethos. There isn’t a brotherhood. We know the good and the bad side of the feminist movement. Like, you know, kind of like, you know, if, if we step out or misspeak or say something wrong, or sometimes even when we’re right, you know, the ladies will turn up and be like, hey, you’ve got that wrong, or I think this. There isn’t that.

Jameela: Die, die, die, die.

Caitlin: But there isn’t that with the men, like kind of like someone will say something and everyone will just be there, okay. There isn’t that sense of a collective. [00:15:00] There isn’t that sense of a movement. It doesn’t have an objective. It doesn’t have a name. And that’s what I mean when I say men need an equivalent of feminism. That’s why I thought maybe writing a book about it that was mainstream and accessible. To the criticism, so first of all, the main slew of internet horror, uh, was when the book was announced when no one had read it. The three reactions I got were 1), women who were going, “You’ve abandoned women, why are you now pandering to men, you handmaiden?” And, to them, the thing is, you can’t fix the girls until you fix the boys. 50 percent of any woman’s problems are usually a man. A bad man. You know, a man that harasses you. A man that talks over you. A man that is belittling you. A man that makes you feel uncomfortable and scared. While there are still broken, fucked up boys, it doesn’t matter how feminist and incredible we are, girls are still going out there and having to deal with them, so you can’t fix the girls until you fix the boys.

And then the two camps of criticism I got from men, again, before they read the book, one lot of guys were going, these are terrible, old fashioned generalizations that you have made about men, saying that men aren’t emotionally [00:16:00] able to talk about their emotions. They’re not emotionally adroit. That’s a really old fashioned view of men, how dare you, fuck your book.

And then the second bunch of guys were like, how dare you say we should talk about our emotions. We’re not biologically wired for it, you’re trying to turn us into women. Fuck your book. At which point I was like, if you two disparate groups actually got together and discussed this, that’s the start of the kind of men’s movement I’m talking about. Talk about it. I don’t know. Are men biologically wired differently to their emotions than women? We don’t know. You guys need to talk about it. I’m going to start a conversation, but you need to be talking about this together. And by the way, obviously, #notallmen. I do deal in generalizations. But at the same time, every single generalization that I put about men in that book is based on a statistic. The generalization of men have problems talking about their emotions is based on the fact that the leading cause of death for men in this country under the age of 50 is suicide. So this, it’s not, you know, you know, you can get a couple of Guardian reviewers naming no names who will go, I didn’t recognize myself in this book. Oh, I’m, I’m emotionally connected and I can talk about my problems. Well, that’s [00:17:00] great. But like A) some statistics are telling me a lot of people don’t. And even if you can talk about your emotions, how about your dad? How about that guy at work? How about your son? How about your friends?

Jameela: Yeah. It’s also going to be, like, often a Guardian metrosexual, like, London elite who lives in Maida Vale, who’s going to be writing that piece, just being like, “Not me!” And it’s like, you don’t represent the vast majority of the world.

One thing about the fact that it’s seen as abandoning women, because I’ve sometimes used my platform to speak about men as well, is that I can’t think of anything, as you were saying about teenage girls, more for us than if we help men help themselves. And I don’t mean this to sound like, you know, we’re condescending or, uh, in some form of charity in the same way that we require the aid and the help and the support of men, they also need that because patriarchy is harming all of us. And that word has become, you know a hot [00:18:00] topic on the internet and deeply misunderstood, but we’re talking about the like the rigid stereotypes of men that are keeping men imprisoned inside of themselves. And I think it was Neil Brennan who was talking about the fact that 60 percent of you know, the gun deaths in America are absolutely out of control. 60 percent of those gun deaths are suicide, and the vast majority of those gun deaths are men. And so we do have a problem and we don’t want this to be the situation. And we also don’t benefit from when people are forced to lock up all of their feelings because it’s going to spill out in some way. And often that’s going to be some form of toxicity, either against themselves or more likely statistically onto people around them, often people with less power, so that would be women and children. So it benefits us all for us all to learn how to take care of each other. And that is can feel exasperating and I understand why that feels exasperating but unfortunately if we’re just going to be pragmatic for a second if we really want to fix the situation of this ever growing divide between us because it’s new this divide it’s kind of [00:19:00] like post Me Too, the rise of the red pill movement. We’ve seen this shit all over Tiktok you know all these like 50 year old like steroid filled men barking at 19 year old Only Fans models on these podcast clips.

Caitlin: Yeah.

Jameela: And it’s not to say that an Only Fans model can’t defend herself and defend feminism, but it’s, this is a kid who hasn’t got the life experience and they’re deliberately not talking to academics or talking to grown women or people their own age and their own size. They are deliberately trying to humiliate these girls online for these like smackdown clips that are heavily edited that then go viral. To prove that men are superior to women. It’s sad that they, that some men in this world see it as a threat. It seems to be that they want to take us back to an olden time where we just weren’t talking about it.

Caitlin: Well, that’s what the draw is. Well, it’s a misdiagnosis because you know, these behaviors come from unhappiness and then, you know, sort of like being lost in your life. No happy, well adjusted boy is going to be doing that. And it, there’s a misunderstanding of what the cure to your unhappiness is. And when you see the kind of like the right wing [00:20:00] conservative kind of men’s right movement, sort of wanting to go back 50 years, they think the solution to their problems is to have power over women again, that that’s what will make them feel better. What they need is a word that’s very similar. They need empowerment. They need to be able to look at their problems and improve themselves and improve their lives. You’re not going to cure your problems by, by having power over women again, because, and we know this to be a fact because women didn’t seek power over men in the feminist movement. We sought to empower ourselves. We sought to be able to learn, we sought to be able to, to earn, we sought to be able to own property, we sought to have control over our own bodies.

Feminism was never about we want to win over the men, it was just we want to empower ourselves. So that’s the offering, you know, the whole point of the book is going, look, this has worked for women. And if, and if you, this younger generation feel that women are winning and boys are losing, then this is the one thing we’ve got that would make you think that we’re winning. We have found a way to empower ourselves. We have found a way to talk about our problems. We have found a way to talk about the things that shame us in a way. And, and the way that we’ve done it, like in this last generation has been amazing. It’s been done with [00:21:00] such humor and glee, like kind of like, I can’t think, there are so many topics that, uh, that men find shameful that I can’t imagine them being able to stand up and do the kind of routine that Amy Schumer does where she talks about her vagina smelling like a barnyard. Like, you know, no man is going to talk about the terrible smell of his perineum and, you know, kind of like gleefully while like 50, 000 men in the O2 cackle going, yeah, you go, boyfriend, like kind of. Men haven’t reached that place yet. Whereas women, we have become so excellent at smashing taboos. We have become so brilliant at being shameless. There is still work to do. But we have found this logic, this lexicon, and this way of communicating with each other that means that feminism has not been a hard sell to our daughters because they just see it as being fun. You can go and buy like, you know, Vagina based merchandise on Etsy. I hear girls on the top decks of buses just going, you know, boasting about their ovaries in a way that I would never have heard in Wolverhampton in the 1980s.

Jameela: Yeah. You’d have to see top gonads, like written on a,

Caitlin: Yeah.

Jameela: God, I haven’t heard that word in years. I’m sorry. What [00:22:00] were some of the most surprising things that you learned while writing and creating this book?

Caitlin: The biggest surprise was how often I use the word heartbreaking in it. Like kind of like I sort of wanted it to be, you know, the, the, one of the reasons why I wrote How To Be A Woman was that, I don’t know if anyone remembers just what an absolute killing field it was for women in the noughties. It was like the worst time for women. There was that thread that went viral on Twitter a couple of weeks ago about 10 women that the noughties destroyed. And it would do things like show the picture of Jessica Simpson after she’d done the Dukes of Hazzard and had gone from a size 6 to a size 10 and the headlines all over the world would just basically “Look at the hog.” just kind of like, “Jessica Simpson ruined herself.”

Jameela: Do you remember Gemma Arterton was in?

Caitlin: Yes.

Jameela: James Bond and she was stunning. She’s a fucking actual literal size 8 and they took a picture of her tiny body and said “Who ate all the spies?” Which is a funny pun. Yeah, but still

Caitlin: Yeah.

Jameela: Insane.

Caitlin: Yeah. Well, simply, Martine McCutcheon in Love Actually, she’s [00:23:00] the fat secretary. Like, you know, everybody in Number 10 Downing Street, when they possibly should have been doing politics, is just spending all their time

Jameela: What, where Hugh Grant almost has a stroke from just picking her up?

Caitlin: Yeah!

Jameela: Yeah.

Caitlin: It’s like, and she was like a size 8 at the time, like, we forget, you know, that time, the time of like, you know, people were upskirting Britney Spears to see if she had a sanitary towel to work out if she was pregnant or not. Like, it was absolutely brutal.

Jameela: Oh my god, I miss that. Fucking hell.

Caitlin: So that was when I started writing How To Be A Woman in 2010, because I was like, I haven’t heard anybody talk to women in a friendly, respectful, kind of human way for a decade now. And when I started to write How To Be A Man, I was like, I feel like it’s kind of the same with men at this point. Like kind of like there has been so much shouting and blaming that I just want to write something that is relatable and funny and just the kind of, let’s just sit down, take the heat out of this whole thing. And I just thought it would be like a friendly kind of like fun book where I was just going, “Hey, basically here’s feminism, have a bang on that.”

And then as I started doing the research and looking at the stats, like each chapter sort of [00:24:00] broken down into a problem that men have, just the helplessness and the lack of kind of like, the being, any big ideas for getting men out of this hole just came at me time and time again, like,

Jameela: Well, let’s expand on that, right? You talk to a lot of men in the book. Uh, some of those stories were really devastating by the way about the way that boys feel when they’re young, things that I’ve never even considered. I had no idea because it’s so fucking stressful just surviving being a girl. But can you talk to me about about what it is that they’re so worried because it is so easy for someone to be like, “What are they so fucking worried about, they’re running the world?”

Caitlin: Yeah.

Jameela: Can you talk about some of the more intricate vulnerable things about boys because I think boys are where, that sounds dodgy, doesn’t it? Boys are where a lot of my interest lies. Um, but I feel like it’s, it’s sensible to be able to not always be on the defense, to be able to be preventative in our work and to be able to save them before they are exposed to the horrors of the internet and pornography and the Andrew Tates of this world. And so can you tell [00:25:00] me some of the things you learned about?

Caitlin: Yeah, so I mean, normally when I write a book, I write about me and my life and, you know, it’s always about writing about being a woman. So when I was writing a book about men, I was like, God, I’m not a man. This is going to kind of screw up my usual structure for a book, which is I take incidents in my life, and then I sort of extrapolate from that, what the problems are and what possible solutions would be.

Jameela: So you stole it from your husband?

Caitlin: Yes, so I stole from my husband. I just basically interviewed a bunch of men. It was just like, actually tell me what it’s like to be a boy. And I think we’re really good, again, as women, we kind of, about talking about girlhood, about talking about, you know, the feelings, you know, I feel like I’ve got a pretty good idea of like what most girls, you know, what the, there’s a quotidian girl experience that we have when we’re younger. I was just like, oh God, I don’t really know what that experience is like for boys. We don’t really talk about that in the same way. So the fear of violence was massive. Talking to men, like grown men now just going sort of like, you absolutely knew that you would take a beating at some point at school. Like, you know, someone would come and kick you, someone would shove you, someone would spit on your face, like kind of like, you would just, you would look around your classroom and work out, you would know every, you would have analyzed every single boy in your class and worked out who could beat you in a [00:26:00] fight and who you could beat in a fight, in case the day came when you were having a fight. You would have worked that out. Which then suddenly made sense of this trope that I had never understood in men, when they sit in pubs and go, who would win in a fight, a bear or a swan? Yeah. Who would win in a fight? Judge Dredd or Inspector Gadget? Like I just like, I heard so many of these. And I was always like, why are they doing this? And it’s the programming from when they’re young. You are having to work out who might be able to hurt you and who you might be able to hurt and run away from when you’re young, so that was the first thing. Like, however many awful things happen when you’re a girl, I never expected to be beaten up at school. I know, again, some girls do, but generally.

Jameela: No, our shit is jihadi level. Like, my God, what girls do to each other in a girl’s school is emotional terrorism.

Caitlin: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Jameela: Yeah.

Caitlin: Yeah. Just the, just the side eye is, is the same as being kicked in the nuts.

Jameela: Oh yeah, or the gentle squeeze of another girl’s like knee or hand when you’re speaking, like can’t bear it, can’t handle it at all.

Caitlin: We’re subtle, right?

Jameela: Yeah.

Caitlin: So, yeah, so the fear of violence is one and then [00:27:00] talking to, when I did the live tour, so many people who worked in education were sort of coming up to me afterwards talking about what they observe in schools. And if you’re a teacher, you’ve probably got a better overview of what happens to children than parents, because you just see your kids, and you only see them for their one life. Whereas teachers are seeing a new intake every year, and they’re there for years. And they were saying, the big change is around the age of six or seven. Up until that point there isn’t really any difference between boys and girls. If boys are scared they will cry. You know, they will hold hands, they will like, kiss each other. They will play sort of dressing up games, silly games. They’ll be fairies, it’s very imaginative. They’ll do things that you would think would be quite girly with no shame or guilt at all. Around the age of six or seven, they were like, it’s suddenly boys things and girls things. It’s like, no, that’s, that’s a girly thing. Like kind of like, “Oh, those look like girl shoes that you’re talking like a girl. Don’t cry. You’re being a girl.” And so many modes of behavior are shut down when you’re in that kind of peer group and those kind of, those kind of gender divides have come in. So, you know, you can’t be sort of whimsical anymore. You can’t be fond. You can’t hug each other. Uh, you know, you can’t be [00:28:00] scared. You can’t show your anxiety. You can’t cry. And so, so young boys’ behavior, the only ones that are sort of allowable generally are either triumph, like kind of we’re winning, we’re playing football, kind of like, whoa, or anger. And, you know, that’s, you know, those, those two tend to be the sort of the two emotions that you, you, you’re very quickly given a much smaller emotional palette to work off compared to girls.

And then the second thing that, um, that came out in all the research that I did, I read a lot of very dry research for this book, and then tried to jazz it up a bit with some chat about malls. And, um, so I was trying to work out, like, kind of, uh, what the other big problems were for, for boys. And the other big one was that boys fine motor skills develop much later than girls There’s usually a two year lag, which means that girls can learn to write neatly pretty quickly. Whereas for boys, it takes another two years, and anyone who’s been in a school will have observed that. If there’s samples of writing on the wall, the girl’s is very neat, and they know what margins and lines are. And the boy’s stuff is like, BLEHBLEHBLEHBLEHBLEH. And it’s literally they, their fine motor skills develop much later.

Jameela: So what does that mean for?

Caitlin: So immediately, straight away, [00:29:00] boys feel like they’re failing at this. You’re going into school every day and being asked to do something that you can’t do. And then there’s a massive correlation that you feel like you’re a failure at. And then there’s a massive correlation between reading and writing. So if you feel like you’re failing at writing, you become disinterested in reading as well, because the two feed into each other. And you see that as it tracks through the years that when boys start reading and boys read much less than girls. And 80 percent of books that are bought are bought by women by the time we get to adult years. But by the time boys start reading, they will read much more text, uh, narrow, graphic heavy stuff. And they’ll be more into comic books, action things, adventures, quests, superheroes, fantasy, intergalactic things, sort of action, doing things. Whereas the kind of things, and again, this is a wild generalization, but we can see it in the statistics. Girls will be reading things that are more, um, uh, studies of humans and how we work, like something like Little Women, where there will be a whole chapter about Jo March getting lemonade on her glove and not being able to take it to the ball. And it’s like, it’s high drama stuff. Like what are the consequences of Jo not being able to wear her glove at the ball? Oh my God, it’s a really [00:30:00] tense and dramatic chapter. So we’re talking about normal lives and how to grow from being a girl into a woman. These are the kind of things that girls read.

Jameela: Yeah. And the things that we’re reading, as you’re saying, are much more about the world at large, what we can expect and our deep emotional journeys.

Caitlin: Yeah.

Jameela: So what do we do about that then?

Caitlin: Well, I mean, there’s so many things. I mean, first of all, I mean, it’s very interesting, kind of like, so Sweden. Finland has the best academic records in the world. Uh, uh, and for boys and girls are equal there and they don’t start going to school till they’re seven or eight. And boys are allowed to, boys and girls, but it’s particularly important for boys. And boys do have, boys have bursts of testosterone at the age of six and seven, so they just go out and play more. They’re just running around more. They’re not asked to sit down and shut up and learn and start trying to do something you are literally physically not capable of that’s already making you feel like a failure. That they only had learned that taught writing, to start writing when they’re actually physically capable of doing it. And that, that was one of the first heartbreaking things that I found in my research. Like why are we setting boys up to feel like failures by asking them to do this thing that all [00:31:00] of our research shows us they cannot do. That’s, if there was something equivalent to girls and, and the thing is that feminism again has been good about talking about the physical differences with girls. Now we talk about period poverty. Now we make sure, you know, our physical thing of menstruating in school, you know, we make sure that we’ve got sanitary towels there in school for them. We’ve talked about our physical problems and we’ve provided for girls in school, but we haven’t provided for the physical difference in boys, which is they just can’t write when they’re that age.

So that was the start of kind of like just looking through this book and just going boys are starved of the kind of attention and care and outrage that we have lavished on women and all I want for boys is what we’ve given to girls and it doesn’t mean taking anything away from the girls. It just means equality. You know, you flipped the, you know, the slogan of feminism on its head. We want equality between the sexes. Well, here is the thing where boys aren’t equal. If we’re real feminists and we believe in equality between sexes.

Jameela: Yeah.

Caitlin: We need to equalize for the boys too.

Jameela: Some of the things I was interested to find out about was a lot of the body image stuff that boys don’t feel comfortable talking about something that [00:32:00] we can all relate to, but the body image has changed so much over the last 30 years of what’s expected for men, where even the superheroes or the, you know, the big heroes of the film, the protagonists were like, you say in the film, like Harrison Ford, middle aged dad, bod, uh, uh, still the absolute iconic hero, and now it’s turned into a very kind of like Marvel centric.

Caitlin: Well, you can see that in the Star Wars figurines. Like, you know, when I watch Star Wars and you watch Luke Skywalker, he’s a very pale, callow youth who looks like he writes slim volumes of poetry. Like, you know, he’s quite a, it’s quite a wan item and the dolls that they made of him at the time in 1979 reflect that. They rebooted all the Star Wars merchandise recently, and Luke Skywalker is in a sort of vest slashed down to here with massive pecs and biceps. So they’ve, they’ve, they’ve literally jacked up Skywalker.

Jameela: Someone in your book, I can’t remember who, described like Marvel figures, no Arnold Schwarzenegger as a condom full of walnuts.

Caitlin: Yes. Hahaha! That’s one of Clive James’ lines, it cannot be beaten, yeah.

Jameela: I will never, ever [00:33:00] unhear that, ever in my life.

Caitlin: I know. It’s all I think about when I look at him. Yeah, even now.

Jameela: It’s made me too scared to do sit ups now. Uh, I was never gonna do sit ups. Um,

Caitlin: So yeah, so we can see that there has been this, you know, the absolute change in the kind of body ideals that boys are seeing. And especially as superhero movies just dominate the box office. Like kind of that is the majority of films that young boys are gonna see.

Jameela: Yeah.

Caitlin: And again, we know the body image and sort of like the role models that we have for women are shit. Like, you know, we know that what you have to do to be an actress, we know that you cannot eat, we know that you’ll be shamed if you put on weight, but at least we now talk about it. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler will stand there going, “It’s, it’s awards season or as we call it, the Hunger Games,” you know, kind of like, we have found a way again to humorously acknowledge these things. Whereas no men are talking about the fact that in the last 20 years, the kind of men that you see on screen are just steriod-ramped lunatics.

Jameela: Yeah, and to kind of circle it back round as to how this applies to us, right, is the fact that if a large part [00:34:00] of the body standards are because a lot of these publications and music labels and industry standards and the brands and the diet brands, all of these are run by men. And so it’s very much so considered just like our problem. What would happen if we could be able to open up the conversation as to how stressed men feel about their image that they don’t feel safe to ever talk about to anyone else. They’re all just thinking must become funnier, can compensate by becoming funnier or richer. I need to get one of those Lamborghinis, you know, like it’s, if they could really speak about it and understand and empathize, then I feel like we would be able to start having, because the point of all of this is that we can all start to have conversations about the similarities between us. I’m not saying we’re all identical. I’m not saying that there aren’t fundamental differences of nature and nurture. I’m just saying that we do have so much more in common. So many of our fears are the same. So many of our complexes are the same. And the only way to bring people back together is to be able to relate to one another. And if they open up about this to one another, [00:35:00] and maybe even, dare I say it, to us, or at least in a public sphere, they can start to realize that, shit, we’re all going through this thing. Who is making money from this? Who at the top is making billions off of all of us feeling like shit about the way that we look? Who, where is this boardroom of bastards who’s telling us all that the way that we are born is simply not okay? And they’re selling us products that don’t work, that are designed to fail, that fuck up our bodies and our metabolism even more, and are the reason why we change physically, like who is fucking with our food? Who is fucking with our healthcare? Who’s fucking with our society? It benefits the people at the top if we spend all of our time staring and pointing at each other and insulting each other.

Caitlin: And you know, if you hate yourself, if you hate other people than yourself, then you’re never going to turn around and start, you know, attacking other people who are making you unhappy.

Jameela: Is your phone going or is it mine?

Caitlin: It’s me. Sorry, babe.

Jameela: It’s alright.

Caitlin: I thought we could firm it out. Sorry. I imagine that my daughter who was bitten by a fox is now going, do I need [00:36:00] antibiotics? And maybe this is going to be her superhero origin story. And, uh, she’s going to turn into fox lady.

Jameela: Wolverina.

Caitlin: Yeah.

Jameela: But it is like, so much of this book is about how do we understand these people that we cohabit the world with who also feel like they don’t understand us.

And there is very little literature out there for them to understand us. I’ve often commented on the fact that it’s so much easier to find, you know, men who write about like aliens and monsters from outer space and, and dinosaurs who are living amongst us now than women.

Caitlin: Yeah.

Jameela: It’s easier to write a fictitious character from outer space, then just someone a bit like your sister, or your mum because we are a mystery to one another, and it is beneficial to powerful people if we remain that way. Because capitalism, which we all love talking about all the fucking time, relies upon us sticking to these like firm gender stereotypes, consuming the cars or the shit, just acquiring, constantly [00:37:00] acquiring and never actually being grateful for what we have or okay with who we are. No one’s ever gone on a fucking ASOS binge when they’re feeling really great about life.

Caitlin: Yeah, true that.

Jameela: Do you know what I mean?

Caitlin: When I wrote How To Be A Woman, my publishers went, “If it’s called How To Be A Woman, we’d better hope a lot of women buy it, because no man is going to buy a book called How To Be A Woman.” And by week three, we found that 30 percent of the people who were buying it were men, because to them it was basically like buying a Hanes manual. It was like, “Oh! That’s why she said that. Okay, I get it.” And similarly, a lot of the stuff that’s here in the book, like the amount of mums that I’ve had coming up to me, like, just brilliant, lovely women who are just doing their best and trying to raise their feminist girls, and going, “I forgot when I was saying to my feminist girls, yeah, fuck all men, fuck all men, that my teenage son was listening to this feeling really sad. I just hadn’t occurred to me like kind of like that, that just, just to watch what I’m saying to [00:38:00] just make sure that it’s equal.” So, so this book is, you know, all I ever try to do in books is be useful and start conversations. And as I say, I come from a big family where half were girls and half were boys. I’m just very, very concerned with just making sure that we are all equal

Jameela: And that we’re all okay.

Caitlin: Yes.

Jameela: One of the things you talk about in the book that I think a lot of people, especially with dads, uh, will be able to maybe relate to is the loneliness of men .And it’s not just dads like there is a huge loneliness issue for a lot of men. There are men right now in the audience who are nodding emphatically. It is so much harder for them to be able to reach across especially as they get older like past those school years where you’ve got class together, you have a common enemy of a teacher or you’re on a team together or something like that. As you get older, it becomes, it feels harder and weirder, or you’re afraid someone might presume you might be gay. Uh, it’s harder for you to just say, “Oh, do you want to go for dinner sometime? Do you want to go to the?” You can imagine how awkward that could be in our current setup of society to ask someone to just [00:39:00] spend time with you without there being like an an active thing that you have to go and do like rock climbing or something like that. “So do you want to go somewhere and chat about our feelings?” No.

Caitlin: Yeah.

Jameela: And yet the answer would probably be yes, because I live with three guys and I know how sensitive men can be and the sensitive conversations they have. But again, I know that because I am the woman in the house. I am a big part of, uh, I create the social lube. That sounds like I’m fucking everyone. I’m not. I’m not. It’s just one of them.

Caitlin: Yeah.

Jameela: He’s here. Hello. Um, but, hahaha, but, uh, I create the safe space because I’m a woman where suddenly it feels allowed.

Caitlin: When you said safe space, I was thinking about your vagina then.

Jameela: Yeah.

Caitlin: You started this whole.

Jameela: No, it’s a very dangerous space. Um, but I, I, I think that that’s incredibly sad. I had this moment at Glastonbury recently, uh, where I had two of my close female friends, one on either side of me, they didn’t even know each other, they’d just met, and we’re watching Elton John’s, like, last ever gig. [00:40:00] And we’re singing all the fucking love songs, and we’re all cuddling and giving each other, like, kisses on the cheek, and, and there’s no sexual tension between any of us, uh, and I was like, and I had this sudden moment where I got hit by, oh my god, none of the men I know will have a moment like this with their friends, ever in their life, where it’s just love, just love and affection, and affection is so important for all of our hormonal stability. We know how it’s important for women’s hormones, we don’t think about it for men, and I’m like, where we’re just cuddling and enjoying the moment, and there’s no judgement over the moment, and we’re just bonding over this beautiful thing and we’re crying and we’re giving each other kisses letting you know, letting each other know how much we love each other. And I know that men love their friends like this. Men would put themselves in the line of so much danger for one another, but they don’t feel safe to really express it and we have created a society that makes them feel like no you are an island. You’re on your journey. You’ve got to make the money and then get the bitch and then raise the children and hope they’re both boys cause you don’t any other bitches in your house. Like [00:41:00] it’s just, the messaging is insane for these young men, a lot of whom don’t actually subscribe to this naturally, a lot of whom don’t want this and don’t feel good and then this goes on into older age.

Caitlin: Did you see that Trevor Noah, um, uh, monologue that he did a couple of weeks ago where he was talking about, um, the sex drive in men and how kind of like, you know, we’re used to talking about men being horny. They just want to fuck, they just want to get the women, they just want to fuck. And he was saying, I think a lot of when men are talking, particularly to each other going, “I’m going to get that girl, I’m going to fuck her.” What they, what they actually really want is they just want to touch someone and be held. Like it’s actually just physically being close to someone and the only way generally it’s allowable for men to be close to someone and to be held and to be intimate and to be in a moment and to let their emotions go is sexually and that the confusing of those two just causes so much heartbreak.

Jameela: I also sometimes wonder with some of my male friends who feel like compulsively like they need to go out every single night and find someone and find some sort of connection. What they’re really looking for when they say they’re just looking for a shag often is like, I’m lonely. I’m lonely. I want some company tonight. I want, as you were saying, to be held, but I want to talk [00:42:00] to someone and I don’t feel like I’ve got a lot of male friends who I can ask to just go out tonight and watch a movie. Like let’s go watch the Barbie movie. Like a lot of my friends secretly want to go do that.

Caitlin: I can’t remember what the exact statistic is, but when you talk to sex workers, they say the amount of clients that hire them and then just go, can we talk? Again, this is heartbreaking.

And then the stats, when you look at it, one in five men in this country over the age of 50 said they had no close friends. When you start looking at what happens to men as they age, and as you say, they go out and they’re not in the school. And like, particularly when they sort of hit retirement age, they find that their social group is just their wives’ social group because their wife will go, “We’re having the people over to dinner or we’re going to go on holiday with my friends. I’m going to have my friends over to dinner.” And he’s like, “Oh yeah, no, I’ll come along to that” because, and it’s just a really simple fix, but like kind of, I’m sure you’re the same as me. I’ve got WhatsApp group with my girlfriends. We’re talking to each other like 300 times a day. I know what all my bitches had for breakfast. Like kind of like, you know, I know who’s put a white swash on like kind of is really satisfied about hanging out and we, we plan ladies quarterlys. [00:43:00] We have like kind of like AGMs where sort of like four times a year we have a quarterly and we go away for a weekend to discuss all the big stuff and then we fit in so many other ones in between, emerge we’ll be like emergency quarterly, something bad’s happened. And women, it’s just a really simple thing, but just women plan in their within their to do list, they have, they see their friends and yeah.

Jameela: I would find it insane to look at my week ahead and not think, when am I gonna see my friends? Yeah, that doesn’t even, it doesn’t even factor that that wouldn’t be probably higher up than work.

Caitlin: Yeah.

Jameela: Cause he likes to work really. Um, but it’s, that’s, that’s, it’s my priority. I’m, I find it as important as my romantic relationship to be, my friends who are having babies are still reaching out to me, making sure we get that once a month hang and catch up with each other. Like it’s, it’s something that men are not told they are supposed to do or given encouragement to do.

Caitlin: Well, it was when me and my friends started planning our ladies quarterlies and stuff, all of our partners said separately, kind of like, “Oh, it’d be so lovely to go away for a weekend with my friends. Like, I’m really jealous of you doing it.” And we all had [00:44:00] to turn around separately and go, “Well, just do it then. Like literally just, just call your mates and arrange a boys weekend away.” Like it is that simple. And when I wrote the first draft of this book and then I showed it to my husband, um, and it’s sort of like just basically going, women organize these things and men don’t. Here are the statistics. He went, “Oh yeah, no, it is that simple, isn’t it? Like I’ve always just thought I’d like to play tennis once a week with my friend Andrew. I should just arrange that.” And I was like, “Yes.”

Jameela: Yeah.

Caitlin: Yeah. And now he does and it’s great. And it was, it was just that simple, but like sometimes, you know, kind of like sometimes you just, you know, again, it’s the point of writing a book like this. You just sort of go, well, well, here’s a problem and here’s a fix to it. But then the, the problem, as you say, gets worse when you get older. It’s particularly when men retire because women are very good at planning our third act. Like kind of women are, you know,

Jameela: Because we’re finally free, we’re not bleeding anymore. Do you know what I mean? Like less people are catcalling us on the street. Gloria Steinem talks about the fact that when she turned 60, she loved it because she felt physically [00:45:00] invisible to men, right? And that for some people can stir up an uncomfortable feeling because you’re like, well, this is a part of my identity and that’s okay, but at the same time, when that’s no longer something that has to become your identity, you get to fill it with so much fun shit and you get to not give a fuck, which is brilliant. So I look forward to my third act.

Caitlin: Wherever I go next, I’m 48, I’m looking for women who are like 60 or over because that’s my future. Like that’s, you know, I’m planning for my future. I’m going, “What are the 60 year olds doing that looks cool?” And like wherever you go, once you start tuning in and bounce through the invisibleness of older women. They’re having a fucking whale of a time, like every time I’ve gone hill walking, there’s a group of like five 60 year olds who’ve like already been up Helvellyn and back down again, and they’ve got their thermoses.

Jameela: Dance classes, learning a new language, joining a choir.

Caitlin: Get a caravan, they’re kind of like, yeah, they’re off to Corsica with Jan and Jen, like kind of like, they’re having a whale of a time. And then when you look at the men when they retire, like kind of, it’s suddenly just like, “Vmmph” Like, you know, obviously #notallmen, but again, the statistics are there when you see [00:46:00] that. Like, kind of like I’m, be sure many of you will know the feeling when you ring your parents’ house. Like, and you know, when you get a phone call from your parents, it’s your mom calling and you’ll talk to your mom for 20 minutes and then at the end you’ll go, I’m gonna put your dad on now. And then your dad will talk to you for two minutes, but he’s rarely the one that makes the call, he has to be given the phone by mom.

And then, but then the heartbreaking thing comes in because I was looking at like, things that, you know, women can be, you know, we can be quite bitchy about men having a midlife crisis. A man who gets an earring, a man who gets a tattoo, a man who suddenly buys a motorbike, we’re kind of like, ah, you know, what a fool, he’s making a fool of himself. But when I started looking at the kind of men who have midlife crises and essentially start being like teenagers again, this is teenage behavior in a 50 or 60 year old man, you find out that they didn’t actually have their teenage years when they were teenagers. But often what you find is that when they should have been having the motorbike and the tattoo and the earring when they were 16 or 17, they were carers for parents, or they were so busy trying to pass their exams, they didn’t have time to do it, or they felt really fat or ugly, or they were ill, or they just weren’t able to go out and be a [00:47:00] classic teenager then. And they’re doing it now. So in the words of Eric Morecambe, it’s, it’s that they’re having all the right life stages, but not necessarily in the right order.

Jameela: Cause when we do that, we change our hair color or we change the way that we dress or we this, that, and the other start going on holidays on our own. It’s like, yes, queen.

Caitlin: Go girls, Shirley, Shirley Valentine, like, kind of like

Jameela: Julia Roberts plays you in the film.

Caitlin: We eat, pray, love.

Jameela: Yeah. There’s no George Clooney, like midlife crisis film.

Caitlin: I would love to watch that film though.

Jameela: Same. And so I think the question is, is that, so you’re, what you’re trying to do here is to start the conversation to encourage men to feel safe to start preparing for the fucking third act, because there’s been no warning ever for men about the third act, and it always takes them by surprise. And I think, I think it’s unhealthy in general for us to disappear off to these weird little spousal units where we just hang out, just us two, we’re in a relationship, nobody else drop all of our friends. I’ve always been incredibly against that because I think that it’s really dangerous to put [00:48:00] all your eggs in just one basket, all of your needs and just one human being, uh, thank you for that whoop. Um, I, uh,

Caitlin: Sorry, I need to analyze that whoop.

Jameela: This isn’t me announcing to James that I want to be polyamorous. This is me, this is me saying that I need so many different things. There’s so many parts of my, my history and who I am that, he’s got a job! Like, it can’t fulfill all of those emotional needs and all those pieces of the puzzle. And I need friends who I have history with who remember parts of me before I was with him. It’s like, I think it’s such a fundamental part. And I think it’s really dangerous for both genders to pour everything just into the relationship. And everything even just into the kids. We need that, that sense of identity and independence. And there’s no conversation, as you’re saying, so we need to go out there and tell our dads.

Caitlin: Yes.

Jameela: To go and fucking book a weekend away.

Caitlin: Yeah. Yeah.

Jameela: We need to tell our lovers and our brothers and everyone that we need to, we need to stop just focusing on the career because that will end at some point. And then you’re left [00:49:00] with no one. And that is a harrowing realization when it’s too late, so prep now. God, this is an uplifting conversation.

Caitlin: We also need to prepare in the mirror our facial reaction when our dad does turn up with an earring. We’ve just got to really practice that. Just like, “Oh, it looks lovely. Dad, it really suits you.” Just in case it happens. Like, cause if he catches you on the hop, he will see your horror in that moment.

Jameela: Okay. So how can women better be served, right? This is something that I think we all want to know here. And how do we explain ourselves and our experience to them?

Caitlin: To men? To start those kind of conversations with men?

Jameela: Like what is the benefit of this for women, essentially? Let’s just start with that.

Caitlin: Well, I think very often a really good way to talk about yourself is to talk about other people. Like if you’re talking to men about their problems and starting conversations, tell me about your childhood, tell me about your experiences. Whenever I was, in the interviews that I was doing with the men, when I was like, “Tell me what it’s like to be a boy. Tell me, I don’t know what that experience is like. Tell me what it’s like to be a boy.” They were [00:50:00] so shocked that they were being asked these questions. I kept, when I kept asking men these kind of questions, they would be really shocked or when I’d have a conversation with them where they could cry and I was sort of like asking the questions and stuff, at the end of it, they go, “That’s an amazing conversation I’ve just had, like, I’ve really cried and let everything out, I’ve really told you everything, like, I’ve never had a conversation like that before, like, kind of like, have you ever had a conversation like that before?” and I’d be like, “Yeah. Yeah, like three times a week with my girlfriends, like, this is what women do all the time.” But once you started a conversation with a man about, you know, his, you know, his childhood and what it was like to be a boy, then the quid pro quos, then you start going, well, this is what it’s like being a girl, like kind of like, those are the most fascinating conversations. You get to compare these two things together. So it’s like that thing when a jar lid is too tight. And like, you’re trying to open it, but you should always turn it that way a little bit first before you try and open it. If we want men to start talking about women and understanding our experiences, if you start by twisting the lid a little bit this way, and start by talking to men about their experiences and problems. And also, I’ve found, you know, that

Jameela: Sorry, did anyone else know that about jars, or has that just blown your mind? [00:51:00] That’s just literally changed my life.

Caitlin: Little life hack there.

Jameela: Yeah, sorry, go on, I beg your pardon.

Caitlin: No, no, no. Um, or if that doesn’t work, you just like thump a nail in it and it releases the pressure inside. But that’s the, that’s the more brutal way of doing it. Should we just do Jars with Jameela for like half an hour?

Jameela: I think so.

Caitlin: Should we just like make this?

Jameela: I think jam jars gonna happen, go on.

Caitlin: Let’s do this, let’s do this. So yeah, so it’s just about starting those conversations, just kind of like, and one of the things that I didn’t realize at the beginning of, of being a strident feminist was that if you want to talk about women’s problems and you go and talk to men, because men generally don’t talk about their problems anyway, they’re just not in a receptive mode. Like, you have to have released that emotional gas a bit. Basically, we’re all full of emotional gas, and everyone just needs to do a little fart. And then you’re in a more receptive space. If men are walking around bottling up their feelings and stuff, and they’re like, :I don’t talk about my problems, I don’t talk about my problems, like, I’m, I’m, I’m screwed, I’m anxious, I can’t talk about this stuff, it’s really tough being me.” If you as a woman then go, “It’s really tough being a woman.” They’re just like, [00:52:00] complete overload. Like kind of, I can’t do this. Whereas if you’ve just released a bit of that gas by talking to them about their problems for a bit, then everyone’s in a more relaxed mood. You’re ready to receive. That’s, that would be the main thing. Release the emotional gas.

Jameela: Something else you talk about a lot in the book, which I think is really beautiful, is the positives of being a man, is the positive things about men, the things that are lovable and important about them, and that you feel like are rarely discussed, if not, it’s demonized to even bring it up. And how important that is for men to hear, for little boys especially to hear.

Caitlin: Well hugely, again, we’re so good at like, you know, I mean, just on, when we were talking about body image earlier, like kind of, again, feminism has been so brilliant in the last 10 years with body positivity movements and just girls encouraging each other. Like if I’d been growing up and I’d seen big girls posting pictures of themselves on Instagram with their rolls and their stretch marks, smiling at a camera in their bikini and all their friends going, “You go girl, flame emoji, dancing girl emoji.” I would have felt very differently about my body. We’ve done that for women, but there is no equivalent for men. There is no positivity. If a [00:53:00] boy, if a fat boy posted a picture of himself in a bikini with it, in a trunks with the stretch marks and took a picture of himself, like his mates would just be like, “Have you gone mad?”

Jameela: Yeah.

Caitlin: Like kind of like, or they’d just be like, “Oh, do you fancy me? Are you gay?” Boys don’t know how to uplift and support themselves. And like, and the celebrating, I realize, you know, as I say, the word heartbreaking is the one that I’ve used most in the book. But as I got towards the end of the book, I was like, if we do want to change things, you have to start with an uplift and an uprush of energy and positivity and celebration. We do need to end this book talking about what’s good about men. You know, if you want to change things, if you want to start a movement, you start from people being excited and going, yes, this is a brilliant thing. This is what we want more of. This is, you know, this is the thing we want to flourish and grow.

Jameela: Yeah. The things like loyalty or protectiveness and

Caitlin: So I started listing all the things that I, you know, I thought of instantly as being kind of like masculine traits, like loyalty, protectiveness, kind of like just the sense of fun, kind of like this limitless energy, kind of like, you know, all this, all this stuff. And then I realized that I appeared to be basically describing a dog. [00:54:00] Um, so quite chastened by that, I went on Twitter and went, you know, how men, how would you describe yourselves? What do you think of the good things about masculinity? And they started listing all these traits and they listed the same ones like loyalty, remember, playfulness, all this kind of stuff. And then no less than five of them went, “We’re basically dogs”. So that’s a great place to start, right? Oh, who doesn’t love a dog? Like kind of like, you know, that, that dog-like element is, you know, is, is really needed. I think women should be more like dogs as well. Like the, the, the, the sort of, because of the way that we still have gendered behaviors and stuff, sometimes it is however much I love my girlfriends, you know, sometimes I do just need to take a break from them. I’m like, I can’t do another conversation about your mom. This can’t all be about feelings like kind of, I just need to go and hang out with some boys for a bit and just like spend two hours like spearing a piece of cheese on a fork and running around going, “I’m the cheese king!” Like kind of like, there’s a sort of light hearted playfulness to the company of men often. Sometimes it’s nice to have a break from being really emotionally literate and just hang out with some men who are trying to throw their pants out the window. [00:55:00]

Jameela: So we’re saying talk about your feelings but with balance.

Caitlin: Yeah, it can’t, but that’s the thing.

Jameela: Everyone.

Caitlin: Yeah, but what we’re saying is like, kind of like, the whole idea isn’t to turn, you know, isn’t to have one blobby kind of human in the center of all experiences that is kind of, you know, we need that variety, we need that choice. And the idea that like, and some people have gone, “Well, you know, are you asking men to be less masculine?” And it’s like, no, if you want to have a beard and live in a cabin in the woods and kill pigs with your bare hands and walk around with like a chainsaw that you whittle things out of, that’s just as brilliant as, you know, I love that just as much as I love a girl who dresses all in pink and keeps a chihuahua in her handbag. Like, these extremes of femininity and these extremes of masculinity, so long as they’re not hurting anybody and it is making people happy, are absolutely fine. We don’t need to all be in the center, in sort of one pool of kind of like, you know, a singular human being. All these extremes. Basically expand the lexicon, expand humanity’s lexicon.

Jameela: And we can never expand or change the lexicon if we don’t understand one another. This exists in every form of division with racism or gender or anything else. [00:56:00] We have to understand in order to be able to empathize and therefore be able to shift closer together. I personally just want to say that my fear regarding how men feel in this world is that there is a kind of subliminal messaging that they are becoming redundant, right? It’s coming from music. It’s coming from the internet. It’s coming from media that, well, these independent women, you know, they, they don’t need you anymore. They’ve got, they don’t need you to go and forage. They’ve got Uber Eats. That’s what Deliveroo is for. And we’ve got doors and windows with double glazing, you know, so we’ve got tasers, some of us. Maybe that’s just in America. I’m going to get one. Um, and we have, uh, we, we have independence as of the last 40 years, we’ve finally been allowed our own bank accounts. Uh, you know, and so there’s this feeling of like, well then why are we needed? Like what are we needed for? We were supposed to forage and protect and provide, and you’ve kind of got that covered. And I think that’s why so many men, like [00:57:00] the more traditionalists, or like the misogynists, like Andrew Tate, etc. like cling to the old days, you know, the caveman era, because that’s when they felt like they had power, or that’s when they felt necessary. Whereas actually, there’s so much to be had in the relationship with men that doesn’t have to require service. Service is lovely. Don’t get me wrong, but some of my best friends are boys, and some of my greatest collaborators, and the person that I love the most in the world is a boy. I want for us to change the messaging in our society, in our movies, in our songs, to no longer just be this romantic obsession that we have between men and women, because that’s not the way that we’re supposed to coexist. When we work together with our differences, we create amazing shit. And so it’s so sad to me that they would feel redundant. It’s so sad to me that they don’t see any value in our relationships beyond fucking or marrying. It’s not true. And if we don’t change that narrative [00:58:00] as a mainstream, if we do not create within our zeitgeist an understanding that we are co inhabiting something that we’re building together, that can be fucking extraordinary and so fun and funny together, then we’re just going to keep drifting apart and hating each other. And these terrible people online are going to continue to gain power by corrupting our children.

Caitlin: So if the whole idea is that, um, that they’re selling is that like we need to go back, we need to go back 50 or 100 years, men need to have power over women again. Women are just sexy things or they’re housewives. They need to, they need to basically not have jobs, not be independent, you go back into the house and that’s how men will feel powerful again and men will be happy again. It will never happen. There is no economy in the world that could have women going back, leaving the workplace and going back into the house and just becoming housewives. If that’s your choice, that’s fine, but like no country could have it that the female workforce would leave the workplace and go back into the house.

Jameela: I mean, some countries literally are doing that right now, but only via force and rape.

Caitlin: Yeah. But like, you know, economies collapse, like kind of like any successful company in the world, like women who want to work are in the workplace, you can’t suddenly remove them. So, so ultimately this [00:59:00] idea that like, you know, men need to like just take women and put them back in the house and men must be the only ones who work. It just won’t work economically, like it just cannot happen. So there’s no point in pursuing any of those philosophies that those men are selling.

Jameela: Because if they knew how much we spend.

Caitlin: Right.

Jameela: They don’t want that. You don’t want.

Caitlin: Yeah. You don’t want,

Jameela: You don’t want the bill for what we’re spending. Nonsense. All the nonsense that we’re buying.

Caitlin: Wait till you see what’s in the bottom of our wardrobes. Yeah. In those bags that we hide.

Jameela: Exactly. Hahaha!

Caitlin: Is that? Yeah. No, no. It’s just some socks. No, it’s not.

Jameela: For those of us who are just fucking exasperated, as I mentioned at the top, like how do, how do we push past our overwhelm when it comes to being a part of taking this on?

Caitlin: Well, I mean, first of all, you don’t have to. I, I always do like to say to people, you don’t have to. You don’t have to engage. If you’re just tired, if you’ve just got too much of your shit on your plate, I, I hate us always saying that, you know, we must be brave and we must strive and we’ve always got to be out there changing the world and stuff. [01:00:00] Sometimes you do just need to sit back and go, I actually can’t do anything at the moment. I just need to take care of myself. I’m, I’m always there to say to women, “You know what? Just take the day off. It’s absolutely fine.” But if you find that outburst of energy and empathy, or if there is someone in your life that like you, you visibly observe a man in your life who is visibly suffering, you know, or non optimal, or kind of like, you know, just unhappy or seems to be dwindling or whatever, then you are going to be motivated by love to want to change something about them. And you have to just start that conversation of like, is the way of being a man that you were sold when you were a child that was policed into you at school, that is being messaged to you through films, that is there in the books that you read, is that not working for you anymore? Like you can change anytime you want. Like kind of like just women have changed so often, even in the last 10 years our ideas of what women are, the minute we see that there in the lexicon, the things that we’re allowed to do, the things that we can say has changed so much.

Jameela: I’m becoming less of a twat every year.

Caitlin: Yeah, right, right. My dickish levels are dropping, like kind of like, but, but that’s the thing, like, it’s so observable that women have [01:01:00] changed their concept of what they are and what they can do and what the possibilities are so gigantically that if men did even 20 percent of that, if they wanted to, their lives would change absolutely. And all the statistics and all the messaging that we’re seeing from so many men, from young men for older men is that they, they are unhappy and they do want to change. And I think they don’t realize that that is possible. And it’s actually relatively easy. If you think of the changes that we’ve seen in our lifetime and the kind of women that are represented, the kind of things that can say the, the taboos that we’ve busted, the shame that we just don’t allow ourselves to feel anymore, like that, that’s the gift that men have there for themselves as well. All you need to do is go, yeah, I do want something different. I am hungry. This life does not satisfy me. I want something different.

Jameela: Thank you so much for coming. Thank you to the fabulous

Caitlin: Thank you!

Jameela: Caitlin Moran.

Caitlin: Jameela Jamil!

Jameela: Thank you so [01:02:00] much for listening to this week’s episode. I Weigh With Jameela Jamil is produced and researched by myself, Jameela Jamil, Erin Finnegan, Kimi Gregory and Amelia Chappelow. It is edited by Andrew Carson and the beautiful music that you are hearing now is made by my boyfriend, James Blake. And if you haven’t already, please rate, review, and subscribe to the show. It’s such a great way to show your support and helps me out. And lastly at I Weigh, we would love to hear from you and share what you weigh at the end of this podcast. Please email us a voice recording sharing what you weigh at iweighpodcast@gmail.com. And now we would love to pass the mic to one of our listeners.

Listener: I weigh my resilience and resourcefulness. I [01:03:00] weigh the ability to get through whatever shit life gives me. I weigh the power to keep going. I weigh being myself.