Caitlin Moran: How To Build A Girl

Leeds Town Hall 

3/5 

CAITLIN MORAN is addressing a full-capacity crowd about poo, masturbation and periods just days after the 156th anniversary of Emmeline Pankhurst’s birth. 

It would be interesting to know the pioneering suffragette’s views on the broadcaster and columnist’s post-Grrl Power brand of consumerist feminism — a gender revolution that comes with branded mugs and tea-towels. 

A promotional tour for her new coming-of-age novel How To Build A Girl, her “rollercoaster of hilarity and outrage,” delivers two hours of what she does best, talking about herself within a broad definition of gender politics. 

An unashamedly populist show, it’s an arena in which well-hung labia can be discussed but not female genital mutilation. 

It’s a personal-as-political approach that has undoubted merits, reaching an audience who feel more comfortable dancing to the Sugababes’ Freak Like Me — the song to which Moran walks on stage — than reading the collected works of Simone de Beauvoir. 

Moran’s lack of verbal filter creates the illusion of easy intimacy as she rattles through anecdotes about putting her Mooncup in the dishwasher, Gonzo from the Muppets being her first sexual fantasy and her feminism Year Zero arriving when she watched There’s Something About Mary. 

There may be none of the promised moments of outrage in the material but she does humorously touch on real issues around body image and the media representation of female sexuality. 

Her “fake it until you make it” attitude includes a genuinely moving letter of advice to her daughters and when she rolls the gentle folds of flesh on her stomach into a pair of lips there’s a collective intake of delighted breath. 

Yet there’s a lack of any real substance and it feels more like a classroom exercise than genuine empowerment when she gets the audience of 1,198 women and 68 men to stand and declare: “I am a feminist” before live tweeting an image of the act. 

Such pseudo-empowerment is only one step away from that of ’90s ladettes, an impression that’s furthered with her constant references to drinking and reading out tweets from her followers that brag about “using my tits to get a free drink from the barman #feminism.” 

Even so, Moran is attempting to bring gender debate back into the mainstream and, if her pop-feminism helps to politicise any of the audience members, then her tour has served a useful function.