Caitlin Moran: "I want women to be able to be as stupid, lazy, dumb and simple as men"

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Like all women embracing midlife with responsibilities (children, parents, husband, job),

is tired.

Most of the time, exhausted.

"Being a mature woman means counting in months the time you have waited to do the things you wanted to do. Sometimes

," she writes in

(Anagram), her particular decalogue on how to reach 40 without dying in the attempt.

You've changed your mind about Botox! If you want to have Botox, get Botox.

Let's be honest about what women are doing and what works and what doesn't.

After writing the book I stopped wearing myself, I decided that I like the look of an angry and tired old woman, of a person who hasn't slept well for the last ten years.

But if that is your wish, go ahead!

I don't know what it's like in Spain, but here you're supposed to keep it a secret.

And I hate secrets.

Who decided that botox is not feminist, but you can dye your hair or fix your teeth, or wear lipstick?

What is the difference?

Let's stop telling women what to do and what not to do. In the book she also talks about how hard we are on ourselves and the hyper-vigilance on bad feminists, especially online.

Has she been thrashed on Twitter? Yes,

It's happened to me two or three times.

The first time it happens to you is horrible.

The only thing you can do is ignore it, turn off the phone, let it explode and pass.

But it is inevitable to have a physical response: sweat, adrenaline, how paranoid you get when you walk down the street thinking that the woman walking towards you ten minutes ago was screaming on Twitter that she hates you.

So now I offer a service to any feminist I see online who is having that kind of bad day.

I tell them: do nothing, get off the Internet for two days.

She go and spend your time with friends.

Everything will pass, take a Valium.

Human beings don't like to feel hated.

And women in particular can't stand the thought of people saying they've been wrong.

And it makes me sad that the younger feminists I know are so afraid of doing something wrong online, using the wrong word, liking the wrong post that many of them don't say anything on social media anymore.

They only retweet other people, because that's safe.

I think feminism works best when it's funny and you can make jokes, like me.

It should be something successful and popular, something that everyone feels like they can participate in, and this idea that one day you could be a bad feminist and do it wrong and be eliminated from feminism forever is not doing us any favors. Why do you think that young men hate feminism? In recent years I have met many young men who think that feminism has gone too far.

They call us feminazis,

they say that feminism is a cancer and many of them just hate women.

When I think about it, I can see why young people think it's easier to be a woman than a man now, and it's because we have everything: feminist clubs in schools, we have Beyoncé!, there are so many songs about how great it is to be a woman, every week we celebrate that a woman has broken a record or is a new world leader or billionaire.

And there aren't those kinds of stories about men, like men aren't doing anything new, like being a man isn't that exciting.

I think they feel a bit abandoned.

There are no stories about children that we celebrate.

That's why the next book I'm writing is about boys.

In it I explain how feminism can also help men.

That is what it consists of: understanding gender,

why some things are for women and some things are for men, but everything should be for everyone.

There should be nothing in the world that boys and girls should not enjoy together.

Since men are lazy and stupid, they haven't written that book yet.

So I'm writing it. Proposes a women's union. It would work, right?

In England we have the highest childcare fees in Europe and if we had a union of mothers, if they all went on strike until the government passed tax incentives to help women with childcare, we would change things at night in the morning.

Women need to unite and unionize.

Above all because it is still very difficult for us to enter politics, it is still very macho.

Do some women marry their glass ceiling? Haven't you noticed with your friends?

Literally every friend I have who is doing well in their career has a husband who does 50% or more of the housework.

And every woman I know that she's having trouble with in her career is because she has a husband who doesn't.

It's that simple.

I've told my daughters: It's important for them to have conversations with their boyfriends about it before they settle down.

But women are almost always too shy to have these conversations before they get married, to ask: how is this going to work if we're going to have kids?

By default, if you haven't discussed it, you will be the one to do all the work.

That's why we drink so much wine.

In the book he also talks about what it means to be in a relationship for many years and the few stories that exist about it. I've been with my husband for 25 years and all the stories I see are always about how someone meets another person and they get married, that's usually the end.

What happens after that is the hard work and also the really good stuff.

Everything you build becomes something amazing.

No one celebrates long term relationships and they are truly amazing.

It's lucky to get to spend that much time with someone and still like them.

As I explain in the book, my husband and I have maintenance sex at 9 every Friday.

But since the book came out and I told it, a lot of friends thought it would be fun to call me at that time, so we had to change our hours.

He also claims that men think differently, that they see the world in a much simpler way. I've read a lot about brain development and basically men see the world in a simpler way, not like people who are subjected to more anxiety and that they have things more difficult.

Adrenaline makes you form more brain.

It is our superpower.

We know we have to be smarter and faster.

But I don't like this narrative that women have to be amazing at all times, that we have to be twice as smart as a man and work twice as hard, and that's amazing.

The future I want is where women can be just as stupid and lazy and dumb and simple as men.

I don't want women to have to be amazing anymore.

I really hope that the women of the next generation can be a little more average, that they can walk down the street without thinking about anything, like a man.

I can't remember the last time I wasn't thinking about anything.

I don't think that has ever happened.

And I look at my husband and four times a day I detect that his brain has turned off for a little while.

He can do that and he's a good man, he's charming.

He can turn off his brain and I can't. One of his daughters had a serious eating disorder.

She talks about the "anxiety generation". I'm very lucky because my daughter told me to write about it.

She is much better now.

Fully recovered.

She was very adamant that she needed to write about it because her generation is very open about mental illness, they have no shame.

But my generation

those of us who have to help them get better if they are sick, we still don't know how to talk about it.

That chapter of the book appeared serialized in

and I think it's the most useful thing I've ever written.

Thousands of people have written to me saying they didn't know how to help their children.

I don't know what the mental health system is like in Spain, but in England, if you go to the hospital with your sick child because he has an eating disorder, you expect them to tell you how to improve it.

And they don't.

First of all, you have to wait an average of a year and a half to two years.

And of course, children are smart.

They know that if their illness worsens they will go up on the waiting list, and that is when they start cutting themselves, self-harming, not eating anything, taking overdoses.

Because they want the help and they know it's the only way they can get it.

It's so dark and evil.

It breaks my heart and you see it happen over and over again. How hard. When you get care, you have maybe an hour a week with a therapist.

That's it,

and the rest of the time it is the parents who have to make the child better.

You have to feed them five times a day, you have to be with them and help them sleep.

You have to try to take them to school.

You have to become a nurse.

I didn't know anything about this when I started, it took me three years to learn it.

I was also so lucky to have a positive ending.

Eating disorder statistics say that a third of children will fully recover, which is the case with my daughter, fortunately.

A third will have some type of eating disorder for the rest of their lives and another third will die.

The mortality rate in young people is higher than cancer or schizophrenia.

It's brutal. It's related to how women are pushed to hate our bodies. Ever since we were little girls we know,

although nobody ever tells you, that if you are a very tall girl, or fat, that is wrong.

Anything where women are taking up space is wrong.

Instinctively, the good thing is to be small.

And that has a mental reflection.

That's why we constantly apologize.

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