The body beautiful

Ten years after after she penned her bestselling feminist manifesto How To Be A Woman, Caitlin Moran releases a follow-up guide to growing older and embracing change. Here, she writes candidly about being best friends with her body, why that’s an anomaly,

things. Can I say this any more emphatically? fabricated balls.

Thus: the ‘muffin top’, which brings up 103 million results on Google – including the claim that drinking neat vinegar for breakfast will eliminate them, which suggests the writer is confusing ‘muffin tops’ with ‘limescale’.

103 million results is weird, because – muffin tops don’t actually exist. It’s just your hips and belly. Just your hips and belly, in some too-small trousers. Believe me. Look in Grey’s Anatomy. Muffin tops do not exist.

Similarly, ‘back fat’. It’s not ‘back fat’. It’s just your back. It’s literally just your back. It doesn’t need a separate name, because it’s not a separate thing.

‘Knee overhang’? Allow me to clarify: no. It’s not ‘knee overhang.’ It’s just a Knee.

‘Cottage-cheese thighs’? – them’s your thighs, sister. That’s how you be.

‘Bingo wings’ – I mean, if they actually were wings, that would mean you would be the next stage in evolution, which would be something to be globally celebrated – and not covered with a Matalan shrug; and as for ‘Cankle’ – well, even though calling a woman you hate ‘The Archbishop of Canklebury’ is momentarily amusing, I think we can all admit that, in the long term, by using it, you’re just ruining ankles for yourself and everyone else. Dude, ask not for whom the cankle tolls for, one day, after six months in a posturally incorrect wedge and/or a good Christmas, it may toll for thee. It’s just too risky to live in a world where you might, one day, look at your own ankle and think, self-loathingly: “That is a cankle! Shit! I have cankulated? – for then, you have then allowed someone else to be the voice in your head. Someone else has put a little explanatory caption beside the beautiful collection of things that are your body, and that is the beginning of a terrible process that can end up with you walking around, wholly alienated and distant from your body, and at risk for many self-loathing behaviours, ranging from self-harm to wearing mid-length culottes.

Women slagging off other women for perceived physical imperfection is like farting in a spaceship: everyone onboard suffers. Including she who dealt it. I do not think you can truly love other women if you do not love your own body. It is urgent, urgent work – for both yourself, and womankind – to learn to love your own adorable legs, and fully functioning arms. And you must never never never allow yourself to start seeing your body as a collection of separate, problematic items – cankles, muffin top, bingo wings camel-toe – for that is the tactic of a far-right polemicist: dividing a glorious whole into a series of sad, isolated ghettoes, and then pitching them against each other (‘I can’t decide which is worse – my back fat or my bra overhang.’) It’s all you, and it’s your best mate. This is an edited extract from More Than A Woman (Ebury Press, $35) by Caitlin Moran, on sale now.

It’s entirely

“I do not think you can truly love other women if you do not love your own body. It is urgent, urgent work – for both yourself, and womankind”