What About Men?
'A must-read eye-opener that makes you laugh, cry, get angry and get happy on every page. It's magnificent' Bob Mortimer
All the statistics agree: there has never been a more difficult time to be a teenage boy. And, therefore, there has never been a more difficult time to be the parent of a teenage boy.
Failing in education; facing a hopeless jobs market; getting their sexual education from violent pornography; and being endlessly targeted by online influencers who, yes, tell them to make their beds, and go to the gym - but also push dodgy cryptocurrency schemes, and think the best place for a woman is ‘working in a Romanian sex-dungeon’.
What About Men? opens with a group of angry teenage boys claiming feminism has ‘gone too far’, and asks: what do boys actually mean when they say that? Are all angry boys, underneath everything, scared? What happens when your son becomes a fan of Andrew Tate? And why do one-in-ten gym-going boys say they’ve felt ‘suicidal’ about their bodies?
Having spent a decade writing about women, girls, and their problems, Caitlin Moran found that, in reality, boys and girls have more in common than they think. Women have spent decades trying to feel better about their bodies; trying to find positive role-models; and feeling angry, and scared, about their place in the world. If feminism has ‘gone too far’ is it because we have started to solve these problems? And, if so, what can boys, and men, learn from this?
Both laugh-out-loud funny and devastatingly truthful, What About Men? is the essential handbook on 21st century masculinity: the birth-to-death guide on how to help boys rebel against anger, cynicism, misogyny and despair, and find the joy in being a boy.
Caitlin Moran is the eldest of eight children, home-educated on a council estate in Wolverhampton, believing that if she were very good and worked very hard, she might one day evolve into Bill Murray.
She published a children’s novel, The Chronicles of Narmo, at the age of 16, and became a columnist at The Times at 18. She has gone on to be named Columnist of the Year six times. At one point, she was also Interviewer and Critic of the Year - which is good going for someone who still regularly mistypes ‘the’ as ‘hte’. Her multi-award-winning bestseller How to Be a Woman has been published in 28 countries, and won the British Book Awards’ Book of the Year 2011. Her two volumes of collected journalism, Moranthology and Moranifesto, were Sunday Times bestsellers, and her novel, How to Build a Girl, debuted at Number One, and is currently being adapted as a movie. She co-wrote two series of the Rose d’Or-winning Channel 4 sitcom Raised by Wolves with her sister, Caroline.
Caitlin lives on Twitter with her husband and two children, where she spends her time tweeting either about civil rights issues, or that picture of Bruce Springsteen when he was 23, and has his top off. She would like to be remembered as ‘a very sexual humanitarian’.