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Hi. co.uk slash summer. Hello and welcome to the Spectators Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for

The Spectator, and this week I'm very pleased to be joined by Catlin Moran, who after having

taught us how to build a woman and how to build a girl, has written a new book called What About Men?

Catlin, welcome. Now, you are kind of famously, some might say, a lady. So what qualifies you to write this book?

I think technically more of a woman than a lady. A lady suggests standards which I simply don't live up to.

I think a lot of women and

feminists will have a right smile when they see the title, What About Men? Because if you do spend

most of your time talking about the ladies and the girls and the problems they're in, and then you do a

public event and you spend an hour talking about women and girls, often the second or third question

you'll be asked by someone in the audience is, yes, yes, yes, women are girls, but what about men? And for the first five years, I was asked that question.

I admit that I was quite peevish in my response. I was like, I don't care. I've chosen to

specialize in one half of the population, like quite famously teen tids. Also, it would be the ultimate irony of feminism,

would it not, if women had to solve the problems of women and girls and then had to solve

the problems of men as well. But then time went on, it kept being asked the question. And then

two years ago on International Women's Day, I had the inciting incident that starts my journey,

which was I was doing an event in a college,

15 and 16 year olds, half girls, half boys, was there to talk about women and girls.

And the boys kind of hijacked the session, and they did not want to talk about the problems

...