Feminist Author To Young Girls: Don't Read Books By Men

Article here. Excerpt:

'Caitlin Moran, the feminist author of How to Be a Woman, is now insisting that girls eschew reading books by male authors until the girls have become women.

Moran, writing an International Women’s Day article written for the publishing house Penguin, first innocuously lauds feminist icon Gloria Steinem for saying Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women was the book that most changed her life. Then she gets down to feminist business:

Oh man, she’s right - so right I yelped when I read it. Because if I had one piece of advice for young girls, and women, it would be this: girls, don’t read any books by men. Don’t read them. Stay away from them. Or, at least, don’t read them until you’re older, and fully-formed, and battle-ready, and are able to counter someone being rude to you, in conversation, not with silent embarrassment, or internalised, mute fury, but a calm, “Fuck you very much, and goodbye.”

Because if there’s one thing that has made me, perhaps, happier in myself, and more confident about writing the truth, and less apt to run myself down for my appearance, weight, loudness and unusualness than many, many other women, it’s that I never read books by men when I was younger.'